Open, Smart and Inclusive Development:ICT for transforming North Africa
16 July 2012
The paper aims to provide a new way of looking at ICT as a central driver of economic transformation and global competition. It aims to raise awareness of the ICT revolution and its implications for development, and offers a menu of possibilities and applications.
It explores how ICT offers new approaches and platforms to the region’s development challenges—and how ICT can be deployed to address the core challenges. In doing so, it aims to bridge the current divide between policy makers, development economists, and ICT specialists.
The paper starts by outlining the broad development challenges facing North African countries, which can be most effectively addressed by a development path. Then it briefly outlines the ICT landscape for North Africa and the Middle East (MENA). The paper then proposes and defines a paradigm for development, enabled by the ICT revolution: open, smart and inclusive (OSI) development. It briefly sets the broad context by drawing on the profound implications of ICT on growth and governance within a globalized economy. Next, three major sections of paper explore how ICT could be harnessed to pursue open government and smart decision making; smart and inclusive public service delivery; and smart enterprise development, human development, and inclusive growth. The paper concludes with defining four fundamental practices in pursuing OSI
development.
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